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Evolution of Google Search

While PageRank certainly plays a large part in the accuracy of Google searches, several other algorithms are implemented by Google to give them an advantage over Yahoo and Bing. Google Panda is an algorithm implemented by Google around February of 2011. Panda is a spam-fighting algorithm that measures the caliber of a website. If a website is ranked low by this algorithm, then it is less likely to show up in search results. This allows Google to add another measure of quality to the links among websites and determine which ones should be displayed.

Based solely on Google PageRank, it seems pretty easy to scam the system. One could simply pay for other websites to link to their site in order to boost rankings. For a while this worked well since PageRank starts by measuring the number of links into a website. The Penguin update to Google’s search algorithm helped detect these “bad” links. As a result, it has become increasingly difficult to buy fake links that boost ones ranking in Google search.

Finally, the Hummingbird algorithm was also added to the Google search engine. This algorithm is slightly different than the previously mentioned ones. Instead of detecting spam, this algorithm is useful for understanding the context of a search query.  While the search algorithm previous to the Hummingbird addition examined the individual words, this algorithm views the search query as a whole. As a result, the entire sentence is taken into account and the search results reflect what the sentence is asking for as opposed to each word. These three algorithms have greatly improved the accuracy of Google search and significantly progressed from the simple PageRank.

 

Sources:

http://www.livemint.com/Companies/W1jink4ZIGGBv1lb6HzTFO/Google-sharpens-focus-on-AI-for-search.html

http://searchengineland.com/google-panda-is-now-part-of-googles-core-ranking-signals-240069

http://searchengineland.com/library/google/google-penguin-update

http://searchengineland.com/library/google/hummingbird-google

 

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